🌈 9 things to do in London this weekend with the kids (2–3 August)

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Hey DILFs!

Ever wished your local charity shop came with decent lighting, curated rails and zero risk of elbowing someone over a £3 cardigan? Enter Charity Super.Mkt – a kind of department store for second-hand fashion, where multiple charities set up stall like glamorous little concessions.

You’ll find all sorts: one-off pieces, second-hand staples, reworked denim, plus the Made Better range – clothes that were slightly falling apart, until someone very patient stitched them back together and made them cool again. There are also free repair workshops every Wednesday, in case your own moth-eaten jumper deserves a second chance too.

Charity Super.Mkt is being hosted by NOW Gallery in Greenwich until the end of the month, which means you have a while to plan a shopping spree that would make Greta proud.

And now for what else you can do this weekend…

Enjoy!

Jeff xx

1: Wander through a world of dancing colour

Ugo Rondinone: the rainbow body
Saturday 2 August, 11:00–18:00 (last day of exhibition)
Sadie Coles HQ, 62 Kingly Street, W1B 5QN
FREE
Age guidance: suitable for all

My three-year-old is obsessed with rainbows. Not in a physics-y, “Isn’t it interesting how rainbows result from a minimum deviation angle in light refraction near 138° through water droplets?” sense. More in a “DADDY!!! THERE’S A RAINBOW!!!” shriek triggered by anything vaguely stripy and colourful. Pride Month nearly killed me.

So I’m not entirely sure why I’m subjecting myself to yet more excitable chanting that gets louder by the second. But here we are: Ugo Rondinone’s the rainbow body has turned Sadie Coles HQ gallery into a sort of Dulux showroom that’s tried to colour-match a bouncy castle. The floor, walls and ceiling are painted in solid blocks of highlighter-bright colour, and scattered across them are life-sized human figures painted to match.

Those figures are based on real dancers, and the bright colours reference the “rainbow body” phenomenon in Buddhism, said to be the highest level of spiritual attainment. It’s when the physical body dissolves into the lights of the spectrum and then fully disappears.

So if you’ve ever wanted to feel both overstimulated and strangely calm, this is probably the place. But do take a moment to wonder how many sample pots of paint died in the making of this experience.

Find out more: https://www.sadiecoles.com/exhibitions/1217-ugo-rondinone-the-rainbow-body

2: Scale the skyline with Peppa

Peppa Pig Meet & Greet at Lift 109
Monday 4th, Tuesday 5th and Wednesday 6th August (note: no tickets available on the weekend), 10:30 and 11:15
Battersea Power Station, Circus Road West, Nine Elms, SW11 8DD
Adults £16, 3–15s £12, 0–2s free
Age guidance: suitable for all

“I have been known to refer to her as the ‘hideous little hog’. She’s a rude, arrogant and obnoxious little shit.”

“The pig tests my vegetarianism.”

“The pig families heads all look like cock and balls I hate the art direction of that show.”

“I don’t like the hill system in that show. The steepness is unfathomable and unrealistic. For a passenger vehicle to scale them, I just can’t.”

For myriad reasons, it seems not everyone is a fan of Peppa Pig. In our household, we’re not wildly keen on Peppa the character, but we LOVE Daddy Pig, Freddie Fox, Miss Rabbit and Suzy Sheep. And we do enjoy many of the storylines – although if you’ve seen the latest season at the cinema and have criticisms, so do I. And I’d like to swap notes.

Minor quibbles aside, if you’re a fan of the show too (and more importantly, if your child is), then here’s a surprise bit of casting news: Peppa is currently starring in a lift. A very tall, very expensive lift at Battersea Power Station.

Lift 109 is normally pricey. As in, £23-a-head pricey. But bizarrely, the Peppa Pig Meet & Greet includes storytime (Peppa Goes to London), a chance to meet Peppa herself, and a ride to the top of the iconic chimney – and it all costs less than a standard Lift 109 ticket.

If you’re not into Peppa Pig, that’s totally fair. But at this price – and with that view – you might just find her slightly more tolerable.

Note: this Peppa Pig experience is actually only available on selected weekdays (not the weekend), but I thought it was such a great opportunity that I had to include it.

Find out more: https://lift109.co.uk/?promocode=peppa

While you’re there…

👍️ You’re near Battersea Park, home to a sub-tropical garden, a herb garden, a children’s zoo, a boating lake and some of the best views in London.

3: Get real about virtual perfection

Virtual Beauty
Saturday, 10:00–20:00 and Sunday, 10:00–18:00 (plus daily until 28 September)
Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
Pay What You Can: “We are asking visitors who are able to do so to consider making a donation to support the work of Somerset House.”
Age guidance: 15+

I was listening to a pop culture podcast the other day, because it’s very important to stay informed about which celebrities are feuding, mating, or doing both at once on a yacht. And one topic was how celebrities often look so strange now when papped in natural daylight. With so many filters and edits on social media – and that much plastic surgery – what seems normal on screen looks uncanny in real life.

That’s reassuring, right? What kind of normal person wants to look good on our laptops and telly but slightly cyborgotic in real life? If even the ultra-rich with their surgeons and soft lighting can’t quite make it work in 3D, maybe we’ll all stop trying.

But, as Virtual Beauty makes clear, that’s not happening. Even if we’re not going in for the surgery, we’re still editing the version of ourselves that lives online. We filter, we brighten, we smooth, we add some follicles, we slim down, we muscle up… and slowly, the image we curate starts to feel more real than the one with manboobs and forehead lines. We end up with warped ideas of what we actually look like.

That’s what a lot of the artists in Virtual Beauty are wrestling with: how self-image, identity and beauty standards are being rewritten not just by media, but by ourselves – in the way we present, tweak and repackage our faces for the feed.

One artist, Qualeasha Wood, explores what it means to live a life that’s always online. She’s taken her selfies – often juxtaposed with screenshots of pop-up windows, message notifications and even abusive comments – and turned them into large-scale woven tapestries.

The one I’m most keen to see is Excellence & Perfections, which focuses on a different sort of editing. It’s an Instagram “performance piece” by Amalia Ulman, in which she used her own account to conduct a scripted online performance with stories and details that she knew would be popular. Over the course of five months in 2014, she pretended to have a breast augmentation, staged moving to a new city, feigned a break-up and claimed to be doing drugs – all with beautifully arranged flowers, expensive clothing and delicious-looking brunches in the background. By the end of her project, she had 90,000 followers.

Virtual Beauty also features a life-size silicon sculpture that looks human at first glance – but it has phone screens embedded in its face, and visitors can use the screens to change properties such as the race, gender and age of the sculpture. It’s a clever way to demonstrate how slippery identity has become when everything – even our faces – can be edited on demand.

This exhibition feels like a fantastic education for older children – so if you think yours are at the right stage, they might get a lot out of it.

Find out more: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/virtual-beauty

While you’re there…

👍️ Waterloo Bridge has my favourite views in London. Look west to Big Ben, the South Bank and London Eye, and look east for Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf and St Paul’s Cathedral.

👍️ The Peppa Pig Afternoon Tea London SIghtseeing Bus Tour departs from Temple (three minutes from Somerset House) at 12:15, 14:45 and 17:30 most days throughout the summer, and it’s a hoot. Whenever you pass a landmark that features in a Peppa episode, little monitors on your table will play the relevant excerpt.

Bus tours are always expensive, and afternoon tea is always an absolute swizz. Combine the two and you get an experience that’s swizztastically expensive. But actually not that much more than afternoon tea or a bus tour on their own: £50ish for adults and £40ish for kids, depending on the day.

(I promise Big Peppa isn’t blackmailing me into promoting the show multiple times per newsletter.)

4: Crack the code of loo signs and sumo icons

Pictograms
Saturday, 10:00–19:30 and Sunday, 12:00–17:30 (and daily until 24 August)
Japan House, 101–111 Kensington High Street, W8 5SA
Free (booking required)
Age guidance: suitable for all

When a dictionary’s Word of the Year is an emoji, I think we can all agree that words are over. Screwed. Done. We’re back to pictures again – just like our ancestors, when cave walls doubled as weather reports drawn in bison.

PLOT TWIST: IT’S ALREADY HAPPENED! Back in 2015, Oxford Dictionaries crowned “😂” (“face with tears of joy”) as its Word of the Year. To be fair, emojis beat the horrors of teenage textspeak that dominated the early-2000s and made us cringe even back then. Remember “gr8” and “ne1”? I’d much rather get a “👉👌” than “DTF?”. (But beggars can’t be choosers, and realistically I’d have been fine with either.)

Emojis are pictograms: symbols that convey meaning by looking like the thing they represent. They’re efficient, and they’re perfect when you don’t share a single word of vocabulary. Imagine driving through rural Poland and seeing a sign that says “Niebezpieczny Urwisko” – or just spotting a picture of a car flying off a cliff. One of them may save your life, while the other might get you killed before you can open Google Translate.

As with most clever things, the Japanese were way ahead. In 1964, when the rest of us were faffing about with lava lamps and tinned ham, a Tokyo design agency created a set of universal symbols for the Olympics, to communicate information to a global audience regardless of language. Fast-forward to 1999 for another turning point, when a Japanese designer developed the first set of emoji (“e” = picture, “moji” = character). And Japan’s still quietly leading the way, refining these symbols into an artform.

This exhibition explores it all – from the ancient pictograms in Egyptian tombs to the newest graphic systems shaping modern life. You can create your own symbol, and wander among mega-sized pictograms: stand under a 2.5-metre torii shrine gate, square up to a sumo wrestler, or take the controls of a Japanese train.

And I’m especially intrigued by one section: young people from across the UK were invited to design pictograms representing “their London”. Could be poetic. Could be vape clouds and overflowing bins. Either way, it’s worth a look.

Find out more: https://www.japanhouselondon.uk/whats-on/pictograms-iconic-japanese-designs

PS This article, about the process of creating a visual language, is fascinating.

While you’re there…

👍️ Sticking with the Japan theme… Kyoto Garden in Holland Park is stunning. Fun fact: it was a gift from the city of Kyoto (in 1991) to commemorate the long friendship between Japan and Great Britain.

👍️ Your children will want to go to Holland Park Adventure Playground instead of the Kyoto Garden. And as much as I love Kyoto Garden, I can’t really blame your children: this is one of the best playgrounds in London

5: Enter houses made of paper and thread

The Genesis Exhibition: ​​Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Saturday and Sunday, 10:00–18:00
Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG
Adults £20, 12–17s £5, under-12s free
Age guidance: suitable for all

This week I discovered there’s a term for the uniquely bonkers way in which some galleries describe their exhibitions. The term is “International Art English”, and I’ve been hating it for years without realising I’m far from alone in my exasperation. .

International Art English is about describing an artist’s work as "gestural vocabularies interrogating the domestic”, or "... imaginatively propel[ling] its viewer forward into the seemingly infinite progression of possible reproductions that the artist's practice engenders, whilst simultaneously pulling them backwards in a quest for the 'original' source or referent that underlines [the artist’s] oeuvre”. It’s convoluted sentences, abstract jargon, and an impressive ability to obscure meaning rather than clarify it.

Sometimes it’s just a thesaurus gone rogue – “a provocation of the seated form” instead of “chair”. Other times, it’s panic disguised as confidence: no one knows what they’re talking about, so they reach for the most impressive-sounding words nearby and hope no one notices.

Once you’ve learnt to spot International Art English, you start seeing it everywhere – including at Tate Modern, where Korean-born, London-based artist Do Ho Suh is “asking timely questions about the enigma of home” and “examining the intricate relationship between architecture, space, the body, and the memories and the moments that make us who we are”.

It’s a shame to think the description might put some people off, because, from everything I’ve read (by people who can accurately talk about it), it does sound worth it. The big draw is Suh’s life-sized fabric recreations of the places he’s lived – stitched out of translucent coloured polyester and filled with uncanny levels of detail, from radiators to plug sockets. You actually walk through them, room by room, with each space copied from a different house or flat he’s lived in.

There’s also a ghostly paper rendering of Suh’s childhood home in Seoul, made by wrapping the entire building in mulberry paper and rubbing it with graphite to capture every texture. It was left to weather in the elements for nine months before being rebuilt in the gallery, mildew and all.

There’s lots more to see ​​– and once you’ve taken a look for yourself, feel free to go home and describe it as “a haunting interrogation of spatial memory”. Just to keep the cycle going.

Find out more: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/the-genesis-exhibition-do-ho-suh

6–9: More, more, more, more!

Ásrún Magnúsdóttir: Listening Party
Saturday 2 August
14:00 and 19:00
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX
£14 per person
Age guidance: 8+

“Get ready to be moved as London teenagers dance to their favourite songs in this word-of-mouth hit by one of Iceland’s leading theatre makers.”

Tomorrow's Warriors Extraordinary Summer Showcase
Sunday 3 August
16:00
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX
Free – no ticket required
Age guidance: suitable for all

“Catch live music from the talented artists of Tomorrow’s Warriors, featuring some of the finest young jazz musicians on London’s fizzing scene right now.”

Summer by the River: Fiya House Hip Hop Weekender
Saturday and Sunday, 12:00–22:00
The Scoop at More, SE1 2AA
Free – no ticket required
Age guidance: suitable for all

“Watch pop-up performances from world-renowned dance artists, youth crews and incredible live DJs, bringing together local people to celebrate community spirit.”

Play Make Do: A Festival for All the Family
Until 16 August (various times and activities each day)
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
Price varies depending on activity
Age guidance: see individual activities on the website for information

“Get creative with illustration or kite-making or take a deep dive into filmmaking and drama at one of our hands-on workshops. Let magical worlds come to life through music, books and storytelling. Get movin' and groovin' with salsa and ceilidh dancing for the whole family or get in touch with your flow with Tai Chi on our Lakeside Terrace. Run away with the circus - just for a day - with aerial and ground workshops or embrace play in one of our play zones where imaginations run wild.”